Russell Beattie - A good rant 2.0
Russell Beattie, a Yahoo! employee, has a pretty good rant about Web 2.0 entitled WTF 2.0.
Some bits:
“The worst thing about all the Web 2.0 hype is the complete loss of business perspective. There’s a few companies out there that seem to get it but just about every other new website I’ve seen lately is nothing but features parading as businesses. Sure, these guys get to be entered in the “Flip It Quick Acquisition Lottery”, but beyond that, none seem to be creating anything of any real value.”
[….]
“Flickr is always held as an example of a 2.0 success story - which it is, but it seems for all the wrong reasons. Does anyone remember that Flickr has always charged money for their pro accounts? They were trying to make a profit from their site from the start, not just throwing stuff together for the heck of it. The social innovations like tagging, and blogging integration were essentialy marketing efforts built on top of their platform meant to drive more people to sign up for the pro photo storage service or click on ads, not core parts of the product itself. It wasn’t social software for the sake of social software, it was “how can we make this product attractive to users and developers in order to drive revenue?” In other words, it was a real business.”
[….]
“Hey - I’m not calling the kettle black here, I’ve already been very clear at how horrible a business person I am already, and expressed my deep frustration at this. But that doesn’t mean I have to sit back, read sites like TechCrunch and not say WTF?”
It is a fairly long post and one worth reading from a couple of perspectives. First, this is a guy that deals with mobile operators and mobile services where there is no such thing as free anything. We have an investment in Quickplay and amen, amen, amen, to that point of view. Second, he works for Yahoo, but check out his resume, yowsa. Besides being a bit of a dot bomb poster child, how about a little link love for a guy who had this job:
“IBM Media Relations - Boca Raton, Florida
January 1994 - May 1994
Worked to help gather "OS/2 success stories" for IBM Media Relations department.”
So, if you are doing a start up, thinking about the “f” word (free), go read Russell’s article.
Reminder: Blogging Dinner Monday night 6:30p in Toronto. Venue has changed – Details here. Hope to see you there.
Wow, quite the resume. I wonder how many companies I will work for in my life.
Posted by: Bradley Twohig | March 06, 2006 at 13:27
I love posts like these. It's always refreshing to know that somebody else isn't drinking the web 2.0 kool aid.
Posted by: Josh Einstein | March 06, 2006 at 15:02
Profitable, sustainable, matters to customers. Lather, rinse, repeat.
- Stuart
Posted by: Stuart MacDonald | March 06, 2006 at 17:00